THE BEAT GOES ON : KEROUAC STILL LURES FILM MAKERS

In 1957, a young writer from a small Massachusetts town figuratively rode across the United States with a fictional character named Dean Moriarity--a ride that took author Jack Kerouac through notoriety, fame, eventual alcoholism and early death at 47.

Now, almost 30 years after “On the Road” flung Kerouac into the public eye, the myth of the man who became the symbol of the Beat Generation still fascinates college freshmen and literati alike.

The percussive quirkiness and funky heroes of the Beat’s prose and poetry--literature that stood for rejection of stodgy postwar middle-class values--helped usher in a new era of social protest that paved the way for ‘60s unrest.

“What Happened to Kerouac?” a new film about Kerouac and the Beats that makes its full-length L.A. debut Sunday at the Nuart, examines the general misinformation, multiple sociological theories and conflicting biographical accounts of Kerouac and his contemporaries, such as Carolyn Cassady, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs.

The film’s co-directors, Lewis MacAdams and Richard Lerner, believe that Kerouac’s outsized reputation comes from a present-day paucity of emotional heroes in the high-tech, high- macho ‘80s.

“We really went for emotion, because we felt it was so important to Kerouac. It’s what sets him apart as a writer,” MacAdams said.

“The film could’ve been a very dry, analytical documentary,” added Lerner, who also produced the film. “Instead, we tried to re-create some of the feeling of those times--by testimony and by a kind of impressionism in the shooting of it.”

Carolyn Cassady, the wife of Neal Cassady who was the real-life model for “On the Road’s” Dean Moriarty’s real-life model, thinks that Kerouac’s emotionalism contributed to the myths surrounding him.

“Jack was one of the worst to try to pin down, because he really was so flaky and changed his mind all the time,” said Cassady, a close friend of Kerouac’s. “He’d latch onto one thing and then drop it again just as fast. One of the big misconceptions about him is that he had some guiding philosophy or something behind his work. He didn’t at all. All of his emotions were just out there, and he went with them.”

Lerner traced the genesis of “What Happened to Kerouac?” back to 1982, when he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder to shoot footage of a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the publication of “On the Road.” He taped 21 hours of interviews with such Beat notables as Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Gary Snyder, chronicling the rise of Kerouac and the feelings behind the Beats.

“We were trying to show some of these great people before they completely vanish,” Lerner noted. “Corso especially had a lot to say, debunking a lot of the myths. But we don’t lose track of Kerouac’s voice, ever, during the film. We found we couldn’t go more than a few minutes without having Jack in there, speaking.”

“But also it’s how a generation felt about their time,” added MacAdams, a published poet who studied with some of the Beats. “This film is as much about the graying of America as it is about any one part of history. All the witnesses were very honest about their love for Kerouac--a kind of love for someone who dies young and somehow unfulfilled. By doing that, they took public note of how their own youths went fleeting.”

In previous showings of the film in its former one-hour version, the directors said, they were surprised at the youthfulness of their audiences.

“Very few people that really enjoyed the film seem to have read his novels,” MacAdams said. “These people seemed to be looking for Kerouac’s kind of hero--a literary James Dean, if you will. It seemed like they were establishing their pop lineage.”

“But not only because Kerouac was the outlaw of his time,” added Lerner. “It was also because he related to them in his emotional complexity and outpouring. I know that when I was 20, I was all over the place emotionally.”

Cassady shook her head.

“I still don’t know what the continuing attraction is toward Jack, frankly,” she said.

“I’ve always thought every generation had these kinds of outlaws--the artists and other challengers of the status quo. All I can think of is that Jack was such an emotional power, a spiritual power, that younger people these days maybe sense that their lives are lacking in that aspect, and they want a good teacher. But it’s really hard to say for sure. All I know is that people keep reading the books, and keep calling me up, asking more questions.”